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NASA's New Lunar Rover in Action
holy_calamity writes "New Scientist has video of Nasa's new Chariot lunar rover in action on simulated moon surface in Houston. As the associated story explains, the two-ton "truck" has a top speed of 20km/hour and is currently fitted with a plough, with additional back hoe and drill attachments to come. Sure it's not glamorous — more of a lunar tractor — but sure looks handy for establishing that permanent moon base NASA wants."
How about living underground?
Lookup "Lunar Lawnmower" it uses microwaves to sinter the top few milimeters of the lunar soil into a hard glassy like substance using microwaves.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Probability on an impact is fairly low. Still would be a consideration which probably results in building (initial) permanent settlements underground. Radiation is a bigger concern, since lethal doses are possible every time energy from an x class solar flare hits the lunar surface.
Build your shelter then cover it with lunar regolith.
Burrow tunnel and build shelter underground
Dig into side of crater and build shelter into crater wall.
your choice. Simply Choose one
There's always risk. Every 100 years or so a rock big enough to do considerable damage gets through Earth's atmosphere. Every few years a storm big enough to do considerable damage hits a major population center. Hell, we live on a molten ball of rock with a crust that's only 30 or so miles thick. Tomorrow the east coast of the U.S. (where I live) could be wiped out by a tsunami.
Your comment was obviously tongue-in-cheek, but there are reasons for a plow. First is for infrastructure: it's useful to push off all of the fluffy regolith (moon dirt) to get to the compacted stuff when you want to drive moon buggies and such things.
:)
More interesting (for me, at least) is for excavation. The plow is used to strip the top layer of loose regolith so that a mining attachment can dig up the compacted stuff. There is evidence of water ice near the poles as well as He-3, so an effective cutterhead and muck retriever could collect resource-laden material. I just so happen to be lead mechanical engineer on such a Chariot-attachable mining module.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
Hmm... Wiki doesn't have a page on it (or fused/sintered regolith either)
here's the NS article:
http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn8320-lunar-lawnmower-to-deal-with-moon-dust-menace-.html/
If anyone is interested, here's some pics my coworkers and I took. Plus a few more pages of crud.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
They were nuclear powered to survive the 14-day night, drove tens of kilometers. At that time computers werent too powerful, so these were intereactively controlled (2 sec delay) with live telemetry.